Internet Marketing, Web Design, SEO, Web 2.0 Optimization
on site optimization
The posts here look at on page SEO
Title Tag Optimization
43 months ago
In today’s cut throat competitive world, it is highly important to put in place a proper search engine optimization(SEO) strategy. A proper SEO strategy helps bring in more visitors to your webpage. This in turn boosts your business. One important part in search engine optimization is the optimization of title tags. Smartly written title tags are indeed very useful for increasing the visibility of your web page.
Title Tags
The first title tag that you keep in your web page is very vital. Majority of the search engines place much weight of this first title tag. In the search results of major search engines, the first titles are displayed. This is then followed by keyword description. The aim of this title tag is to help the users to find the desired page.
Title tags are very important as all the search engines give due importance to these title tags. However, it is very important that the content of your web page must be very much related to the title page. Like the title page, content is also very vital in web page. While optimizing the content, various factors such as keywords, keyword density, location of the keyword, anchor text, headings tags are to be taken into consideration. One thing that is common between the content and the title tag is the keyword. It is however, very crucial to find out the best keyword. In order to find out the most appropriate keyword, you need to conduct proper keyword analysis. A proper keyword research will help you find out the primary keywords and the secondary keywords. Primary keywords are the keywords, which are used in title tags, heading tags etc. Secondary keywords are used as additional keywords. Besides placing the primary keyword in the title, it also makes sense to keep the primary keyword in description part also.
While optimizing title tag, you need to keep in mind certain things. It is recommended that you should not load the title tag with keywords. Make sure that the keyword that you have used in the title tag also appears in the content. In order to optimize your title tag, you also need to take into consideration the relevancy aspect. Creating a keyword-laden and descriptive title is the key to raise the ranking of your webpage. Here are some recommendations to find a suitable title tag.
Title length
Search results display around 70 characters. Make sure that that length of your title is less than 70 characters.
Place keyword in front of the title
According to a research, the closer to the start of the title you keep the keyword, the better the web crawler tracks it. This in turn results into high rank of your webpage.
Brand leveraging
If you own a well known brand, you can use the name of your brand at the end of the title tag. The strength and awareness about your brand can indeed make a huge impact.
By following the above mentioned best practices, you can indeed optimize your title tags.
This guest post was written by Nancy Smith
Miss Smith is a contributory writer and have covered topics like finance, money-making, frugality, search engine optimization, etc.
How to Find an SEO Company
23 months ago
SEO Company
It is important for any business no matter what its size to have a web presence. But setting up the website is just a small part of the equation. If you have no way of driving traffic to the site, it is basically wasted cyberspace. This is where a search engine optimization firm (SEO) comes in handy. I know how a business thinks; your first question is How much will this cost me? Because each business’ needs are different I really cannot answer that question. But I will say that when you hire a good NJ SEO firm the traffic that comes to your site and does business with you will be far worth the expense. The cost will depend largely on what your business needs and how involved the web pages are for your site. Web marketing strategies are individualized to the needs of the business.
Domestic SEO firm versus Outsourced SEO firm
Let me start by saying you get what you pay for. Sure, you may save some money by outsourcing to some far off companies who talk about handling your business’ SEO campaign. But what typically happens ends in disaster. They seem to get very quick results and your site appears in the coveted number one spot of the SERPs; but then it all crashes in around you. These companies usually are guilty of using black hat methods of gaining higher positions in the result pages. The trouble is that when it is discovered by the search engines, (and it will always get discovered) the site will be penalized and dropped from the results for good. And the SEO firm (located in India, or some other far away place) will be nowhere to help and will stop responding to your calls It is certainly not worth the risk. It is far better to go with a local, trusted website optimization firm and avoid the penalties.
What to Ask My SEO?
There are a few things that you will need to discuss with an SEO firm to decide which one you want to hire for your business. More than likely you will conduct your own search and narrow it down to just a handful of SEO specialist. There are certain questions that you want to ask each of them before choosing which one you will trust your business’ web marketing campaign to.
The first thing you will want is an example of their work. They should have a portfolio which will display some of their sites. They should also be able to talk to you about the various types of SEO strategies they used to achieve high rankings for the sites. (Try typing in a keyword from the site to see if it comes up in the top three of the results.) Another good question is how much industry experience they have in the field; if a company has experience doing SEO for contractors and you are a contractor this company may be a good fit.
They should also be able to give you good advice concerning how web 2.0 optimization strategies and social media optimization can benefit your website and ultimately your business. They need to be willing to educate you in SEO practices and what they do to help you with your site. When you ask them what types of strategies they will use, these should not be limited to just link building and site content. Those are good, but there needs to be a lot more than this involved in a successful SEO campaign.
Ask them how long it will take to see results reflected in SERP. They should give you a realistic time frame of something like 2 to 6 months. If they say a couple of days they are most likely not legit and will use unethical means. You can also ask them if they can guarantee that your site will be in the number 1 slot in results.
Ask them how long it will take to see results reflected in SERP. They should give you a realistic time frame of something like 2 to 6 months. If they say a couple of days they are most likely not legit and will use unethical means. You can also ask them if they can guarantee that your site will be in the number 1 slot in results. If they tell you that they guarantee you that top slot – RUN! They may be able to come through on the promise, but it will be by black hat, unethical means that will get your site penalized and dropped from the search engines altogether.
Optimization of title tags
21 year ago
This is a guest post by Ben Hook
Ben Hook is the head of search at Navaro, a search engine optimization agency in the UK.
The title tag is one of the most important on page factors search engines look at when ranking websites. An incorrectly optimized tag can leave your website in the supplemental results, hidden away, whereas the right keywords can put your website in front of people at the exact time they are looking for your product or service.
The title tag is visible to both the search engines you users. It is one of the factors that will encourage them to click through from the search results onto your website and so it needs to be both optimized and compelling at the same time.
There are a few things to keep in mind when optimizing this tag to help you get maximum benefit:
1. Use the important keywords at the very start of the title tag – the closer to the start the keywords are the more weight the search engines place on them
2. Use only the most important keywords – don’t dilute the weight that each keyword carries by stuffing as many in as possible
3. Don’t duplicate – One of the biggest mistakes you can make is to have the same title tag across the whole website
4. Keep it consistent – although the tags should be different the layout should be consistent across the website.
5. Keep it to 65 characters or less – Although the search engines will index more this is the ideal limit for neat, optimized title tags.
By applying these steps to your title tags you can have a dramatic effect on your websites rankings and make the most of your title tags.
Is on page SEO still important?
12 years ago
It seems to me that the majority of topics that I mention on this blog, and indeed the majority of SEO topics on other blogs relate to Off page SEO (social bookmarking this, and web 2.0 that…), so I would like to take a few minutes to discuss the value of on page SEO.
On page SEO is the single most important part of your overall SEO strategy (assuming of course that you wish to receive targeted traffic from search engines based on your desired keywords). Although today it has become possible to achieve relative success for a website through the use of web 2.0, this is not a viable strategy for most of us who have a limited budget, and unless you are famous enough to have your site profiled on a major television show, or discussed on the evening news, it is unlikely that you will generate substantial non search engine traffic. The most important part of on page SEO is making sure that each of your pages has the proper Meta tags in place (a title tag, a description tag, and a keywords tag), and also that these tags are different on every page! (Folks, I cannot stress this enough, having the same tags on every page of your site is counter productive and will harm your SEO!). Next it is important to make sure that you have set up a proper internal linking structure to your site (the best way to check this is to ask yourself, am I able to get from every top level page of my site to every other top level page of my site?) Another, frequently overlooked aspect of on page SEO is having a static HTML footer and header (what is a footer? What is a header?) Having a footer/header makes your site easier to navigate both from the perspective of human visitors who will come to your site, and search engine crawlers, which will be visiting your site on a regular basis.
Long tail keywords vs. short tail keywords
62 years ago
Long tail keywords and short tail keywords
The terms “short tail key words” and “long tail keywords” are aspects of more advanced SEO and are typically associated with Pay Per Click advertising (as methods of getting cheaper PPC ads) although they can also be affiliated with organic search, and that is what I will discuss here.
Looking at the definition of these terms simply, “short tail keyword” refers to a keyword that is more competitive and one that has 1000’s of search in Google per month, where as “Long tail keyword” refers to a less competitive keyword that may only have 10’s or a few hundred monthly Google searches, for example, a short tail keyword might be “textbooks” while a long tail keyword may be “buy cheap textbooks online”, or, a short tail keyword might be “corporate team building” while a long tail keyword is “quality corporate team building events in New Jersey”…
As you might imagine, short tail keywords are difficult to rank for, and long tail keywords are easier to rank for. So why not focus only on long tail keywords, right? The downside of focusing only on long tail keywords is that even if you manage to rank #1 on 10 long tail keywords, the combined monthly search volume of these keywords will likely be under 1000 monthly searches, so you are unlikely to get much traffic to your site, but if you can rank #8 on a good short term keyword, with a monthly search volume of 50,000 searches, it is very likely that you will get 10,000 hits just from that single keyword! Additionally, Google prescribes to the “rising tide lifts all boats” philosophy, so if you can get a single keyword to rank well, it will help your other keywords for that page rank well also.
In examining this issue my advice is this, focus on both, experiment to see which method works better for you, you can even study your competition to see how they approach this question, and do not pick keywords that are so competitive that you will never rank for them (it is very discouraging when you put in much work and see no results).
The position of keywords in your URL
02 years ago
In proper the little things count. The little things are particularly vital if you are trying to rank well on very competitive keywords, in this case it helps to take advantage of every tiny, virtually insignificant/obscure preference that Google might have towards this or that. The exact position of keywords in your url is one such preference that plays a small role in the way that Google ranks your pages (if you do all of the small things that each play a small role in your rankings, the net result will be a big improvement in your rank!)
This video discusses the importance (small as it may be) of the position of your keywords in your URL. This video features Matt Cutts, who is one of the senior developers at Google.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRzMhlFZz9I&hl=en_US&fs=1&]
Some facts about H1 tags
22 years ago
H1 tags are one of the more important technical features of your on-page SEO; this is b/c the H1 tag is a title tag that essentially tells search engines what the particular page is about. Having good H1 tags therefore helps greatly improve the SEO of your site. Here is a video that helps explain some more about H1 tags. This video features Matt Cutts, who is one of the senior developers at Google.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIn5qJKU8VM&hl=en_US&fs=1&]
Getting to know you, getting to know all about you
12 years ago
For those of you who are familiar with the song that the title of this post originates from, I want to state upfront that this blog post will have nothing to do with this song; I just heard this song and thought that it would make a catchy title for what I want to say…
One of the important things about having a successful website, (aside from on page SEO, link building, social media/social bookmarking…) is your [website owner] familiarity with your audience, as the saying goes, “do what you know”. To have a truly successful site you must intuitively be able to figure out what kind of visitors you will get and what they will be looking for. Furthermore, you need to anticipate/address questions that they might have, and respond to any unanticipated questions promptly. Lastly, you should be familiar with your business and with your competition and you should learn from their mistakes, instead of making your own. In today’s world it is doubtful that any particular website is unique, even if you are selling blue widgets with orange trim, I would wager that there are a dozen sites selling the exact same product, and each does it a little differently, one chooses to concentrate on blogging, another is active on Twitter, yet another has 10s of thousands of low quality backlinks etc… Anyway, you, as the newcomer into the world of blue widgets with orange trim have an advantage because you should be able to learn valuable lessons from many of your competitors, and armed with these lessons you should be able to avoid many novice mistakes. Therefore, my advice to you is, to apply the title of this blog not only to yourself, but to your competition as well, and to use some of the SEO tools that I‘ve mentioned in this blog to learn the strengths and weaknesses of your competition and to thrive!
What is Google Keyword Tool?
22 years ago
Google keyword tool is one of those ubiquitous tools that is used by practically everyone who is trying to optimize there site (or some version of this tool is used). This tool assists you in keywords that you want to target on your site, and it also gives you ideas to similar keywords/synonyms. Additionally the Google keyword tool tells you the competitiveness of each keyword and gives you the approximate # of monthly searches for said keyword/s. For example, if you have a real estate site that deals in NJ real estate, you can search “NJ real estate” and this tool will give you dozen of keywords to choose from, best NJ real estate, buy a home in New Jersey etc… Since it is optimum for you to have 5 unique keywords on each page of your site, Google keyword tool can be a real life saver.
Website marketing: Do you have a message?
02 years ago
One of the more important non SEO aspects of your website is having a clear message. By focusing on a clear message you are able to better target your keywords, as well as the look/feel of your site, making your site more appealing to your niche. For example, if you are trying to create a college prep tutoring website that would appeal to high school students you may not want to have a look that would discourage students or parents from spending time on your site, (b/c lets face it, in most cases parents are the ones looking for these services for their children) nor do you want the copy on your site to discourage your visitors from looking around; imagine a tutoring website that is targeted for elementary school kids vs. a SAT tutoring website, even though the subject of each site is tutoring, how might each best present their message? Who is their target audience? The most important thing to remember when you are trying to come up with your message is who is your audience? And, what kind of a site would appeal to them?
I know that you probably want to hear more about marketing theory and… but I feel that this concept would best be explained through an anecdote: A few yours ago I was approached by a client who had a book price comparison site, the site worked very well and was able to find very good prices, sure it needed some on page SEO, but basically it was good. The biggest problem with this site was that it completely lacked a message and had an undefined market, when I asked my client what was his niche, he responded “we compare all books, so anyone who buys books” while in reality he wanted to target his website to college students and comparing textbook prices (this was something that I gleamed from him in subsequent conversations). Once my client understood that he needed to have a niche and chose his niche the rest quickly fell into place, we were able to advise him on the look of his site, so that it would more appeal to a younger audience (college students) we were able to write proper copy for the site, and perhaps most importantly, we were able to pick good keywords that the client would have chance ranking for (“books” or “textbooks” are not seen as competitive keywords b/c they are too broad, but “cheap textbooks” and “used college textbooks” are high traffic, competitive keywords that with a little work it is possible to have a good rank.)
The moral of this story is, Have a message! And, hone your site to appeal to the correct audience!
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